This project was led by the University of Bedfordshire as part of the IMAGE programme. The IMAGE programme is led by Cranfield University, in partnership with the University of Bedfordshire, and is part-funded by the European Regional Development Fund.
What does your company do?
Sodalite Limited visual communications have inspired many organisations and have delivered measurable success since its formation in 2004. Sodalite Limited offer virtual reality solutions for space planning and person analysis, specialising in helping retailers and manufacturers drive category performance and communicate ideas in a highly compelling way. Markets include retail, manufacturing and design. The company have built on their previous space planning experience to bring it into the 21st Century and make it relevant to Industry 4.0. Using the latest industry standard space planning software, Sodalite can analyse category or product performance and create planograms designed to increase profit, drive sales and maximize availability.
What were you hoping to achieve with the support from the IMAGE programme? Did it meet your expectations?
Sodalite Limited wanted to explore the possibility of creating a new software tool to integrate with a market leading product, UNITY. With academic input from Dr Paul Sant at the University of Bedfordshire, we wanted to establish a proof of concept and a functional demonstrator of an innovative scaling tool for use within a 3D development environment. This would allow us to move away from having to manually scale AutoCAD models to import into the UNITY environment, which is not accurate. The innovation sought is to use a known concept from within the UNITY model and relating this to the AutoCAD model which will be different every time, so that the AutoCAD model is scaled automatically from that relationship and then that model is imported into the UNITY model.
Dr Paul Sant undertook extensive development work to overcome a number of challenges encountered but the final prototype was delivered and project objectives met.
What benefits did your company get from working with the IMAGE programme?
The prototype does seem to offer assurances that things are to scale and doesn’t interfere with existing processes.
This was an extremely interesting project to work on, and together we have created an excellent proof of concept prototype, and I am excited to continue working with Sodalite moving forwards.
Dr Paul Sant, University of Bedfordshire
